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1 The Auswärtiges Amt of the German Reich, 1871–1945 In The 1950s, the Federal Republic of Germany’s Auswärtiges Amt displayed significant personnel and organizational continuities with its predecessor in the German Reich. The Wilhelmstraße had implemented the foreign policies of Otto von Bismarck and Gustav Stresemann and, more ominously , of Wilhelm II and Adolf Hitler. As a result, interpretations of the pre1945 history of both German diplomacy and the German diplomatic corps played an important role in postwar debates about the new ministry and who should serve in it. Veteran German diplomats attempted to promulgate a positive vision of this past, and ironically those who had experienced setbacks under or who had opposed National Socialism were often the most active. For example, Hans E. Riesser was a career diplomat whose clashes with his new mission chief in Paris starting in 1932 led to his recall. Forced to leave the service in 1934 as a “non-Aryan,” he established himself as a businessman in France and then Switzerland. On Christmas Day 1941, the Nazi state revoked his German citizenship under new legislation targeting Jews living abroad, even though Riesser had also worked for German military intelligence in Switzerland since 1939. He restarted his diplomatic career in 1950 and served the Federal Republic as head of its Consulate General in New York and as its observer at the United Nations.1 In 1959, after he retired, Riesser wrote a book titled Did Germany’s Diplomats Fail?2 He concluded that, considering normal human weaknesses, the ministry’s past record was good. As will be discussed later, starting in the late 1940s his colleagues Wilhelm Haas and Gustav The Auswärtiges Amt of the German Reich, 1871–1945 13 Strohm, who like Riesser had personal difficulties with the National Socialists, pointed to the Weimar Republic’s Foreign Office (1918/19–33) as a progressive ministry led for six years by a democratic foreign minister, Stresemann. Others, like State Secretary Ernst von Weizsäcker in his 1950 memoirs, held Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and other “Nazi diplomats” brought into the ministry guilty for crimes committed during the Second World War and claimed that the career diplomats were only marginally involved in these affairs. They initiated what one scholar has called the “minimal guilt thesis” that has characterized the ministry’s official self-depiction until very recently.3 Yet these theses were immediately challenged, both in Germany and abroad. As historian Paul Seabury pointed out in 1951, “In the vast collection of memoirs and apologia produced by former diplomats of Nazi Germany, Ribbentrop serves the purpose of whipping boy for former German diplomatists now engaged in cleansing their own reputations before the bar of history.”4 Since perceptions of the past played an important role in the creation of the new Foreign Office, we will begin by considering the history of the German Auswärtiges Amt from 1871 to 1945. The German diplomatic corps never numbered more than approximately five hundred individuals active at any given time before the Second World War. With a generally conservative worldview, its members felt strong ties of solidarity to their institution and to their colleagues. They shared a peculiar lifestyle and relationship to the government, which included regular rotating postings at home and abroad for themselves and their immediate families as well as the tradition of “nonpartisanship” common to German government officials before 1945. Weizsäcker, who worked for the Second German Empire (1871–1918), Weimar Republic, and Third Reich (1933–45) as a naval officer and then as a diplomat, told the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in June 1948 that “as a civil servant, one doesn’t serve a constitution, but the Fatherland. One serves whichever government and constitution is given to the country by the people.”5 This was an exclusive professional group both conservative and cosmopolitan in outlook, which defined itself in terms of state service.6 Despite their selectivity, however, the diplomats’ outlook and conduct during the first half of the twentieth century shared much in common with other predominantly conservative elite groups in Germany. The diplomats were worried about maintaining their social and political positions during a period of intense upheaval marked by two world wars, two major economic crises (the hyperinflation of the early 1920s and the Great Depression), and two political revolutions (a democratic one in 1918–19 and a National Socialist one [3.144.96.159] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 12:46 GMT...

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